Serenity will make the Ethereum blockchain more secure, faster, and less energy consuming

Ethereum to finally switch to proof-of-stake mechanism

Serenity, the planned Ethereum upgrade previously known as Ethereum 2.0 will trigger 1000x time increase in scalability, said Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at the recently concluded Devcon4 in Prague. Thearticle published by Breakermag on October 31, 2018, adds that the scheduled upgrade will make the Ethereum network more secure, faster, and less energy intensive.

Serenity: The World Computer as it’s Meant to Be

Devcon, the annual Ethereum developer conference saw the brains behind the smart-contracts focused blockchain platform talk it out and present to their audience a concise roadmap of the developments in the pipeline.

Speaking at the conference, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that Serenity is “the world computer as it’s really meant to be, and not a smartphone from 1999 that can process only 20 transactions a second.”

Buterin recalled the labyrinthine path the developments related to Serenity upgrade have taken. He noted the constant re-calibration of deadline the team had to do time and again because of some unavoidable obstacles like the DAO attack.

The development team was also boggled down with some over-complicated subject matters like super-quadratic sharding.

It’s also worth highlighting that although plans to switch to proof-of-stake mechanism began in 2014, till date Ethereum makes use of proof-of-work mechanism to confirm transactions on the network.

However, the transition to proof-of-stake is not far away. Serenity will finally see the Ethereum network run on a consensus model which allows ether (ETH) holders to “stake” their own coins in order to maintain the network, and subsequently earn incentives for the service offered.

Notably, 2018 saw Ethereum’s lead developers put to rest their plans to develop a hybrid model of consensus which they had been working on. Instead, they decided to take to a longer but more definite path to deliver “a proof-of-stake and sharded blockchain” solution with the properties that the Ethereum ecosystem had been incessantly looking for.

Four Phases of Serenity Release

According to Buterin, the four-phase release of Serenity will commence with “phase zero.”

Initial version with proof-of-stake beacon chain

Simplified version of Serenity with limited features (no smart contracts or money transfers from one shard to another)

Amplified version of Serenity with cross-shard communication where users can send funds and messages across different shards

Final version with various tweaks and optimized features

The tech talk ended on a light note, as the team performed a sing-along, urging the developers to continue building new solutions to propel blockchain technology.

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After having worked at an IT consultancy as an SAP Finance/FSCM consultant for more than two years, Aisshwarya switched to the decentralized world of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology. Currently, Aisshwarya works as the Chief Editor at Blockchain Reporter.

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